For years, Island Resort and Casino in Harris, Michigan sold its golf package with a line that was almost too easy: the perfect foursome. Sweetgrass on property, Timberstone down the road in Iron Mountain, Greywalls up in Marquette, and you. Three courses that belong on any Midwest bucket list, one casino hotel with a bar that never closes, and the only thing missing was your handicap.
Then Paul Albanese came back and built Sage Run next door, and the foursome quietly picked up a fifth course. Now the resort has opened a nine-hole Golden Age homage called Cedar, and the math is officially broken. Call it a fivesome. Call it a sixsome (with you). It doesn't matter. Whatever you call it, the Upper Peninsula is now one of the best golf road trips in the country that most golfers still have not made.
Here is the case for making it.
Where It All Starts: Sweetgrass
Sweetgrass opened in 2008 and put Harris on the map, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about Harris. Albanese laid it over rolling farmland and wetlands with wide fairways, big greens, and enough water to keep you honest. It is the friendliest of the bunch, the course you play the afternoon you arrive when you have been in the car since dawn and your swing is somewhere back near Green Bay.
The island green on the par-3 15th gets the photos, and the double green shared by the 9th and 18th gets the arguments about who is away. The finishing stretch plays right back toward the hotel, which is convenient, because the casino floor is about a 90-second walk from the 18th green and the bourbon selection is better than a resort in the middle of the UP has any right to have.
The Big Ridge: Sage Run
Sage Run opened in 2018 a few minutes from the hotel, and it is a different animal. Albanese routed it up and over a drumlin, a long glacial ridge that runs the length of the property, and the result is a course that climbs, drops, and dares you all day. The fairways are generous but the angles matter, the greens are surrounded by chipping areas rather than rough, and the views from the high points stretch across the woods for miles.
You will want a cart here, and not because you are lazy. The elevation changes are real. This is the course your buddies will be talking about on the drive home, usually while explaining why their score does not reflect how well they hit it.
The New Kid: Cedar
Cedar, or Kishki in Potawatomi, opened for limited preview play on August 7, 2026, and it completes a trilogy the Hannahville Indian Community has been building toward for nearly two decades. Sweetgrass, sage, and cedar are three of the four sacred medicines, and the resort has now put a golf course under each name. That is a nice bit of storytelling, but the golf is the reason you will want to play it.
Albanese built the nine holes on gentler ground next to Sage Run, more contoured than Sweetgrass but without the big drops, and then went straight to the Golden Age playbook. The opening hole is a Bottle hole borrowed from National Golf Links. The 3rd is a short Double Plateau. The par-5 6th has a Sahara-style bunker and a boomerang green with Alister MacKenzie's fingerprints all over it. The 8th is a drivable par 4 inspired by the 10th at Riviera, which means you will go for it, and you will probably make bogey. The 9th finishes with Church Pew bunkers and a punchbowl green, because if you are going to steal, steal from the best.
Albanese has said this might be his favorite site of the three, and the resort's general manager is on record saying Cedar could end up being the best course on property. That is a bold claim about a nine-holer, but Golden Age design is about strategy and fun, not yardage, and this is a course built to be played twice in an afternoon with a different plan each time.
For the rest of the 2026 season, Cedar is a preview: $45 a player, tee times booked online only, and not yet part of the golf packages. If you are staying on a package this fall, you can add it separately. In 2027 it gets folded into the package lineup and the perfect fivesome becomes official.
The Road Trip Legs: Greywalls and Timberstone
The Island package has always been about more than what sits next to the hotel, and the two away courses are worth every mile.
Greywalls is the Mike DeVries design at Marquette Golf Club, about an hour and a half north on the shores of Lake Superior. It is carved through granite outcroppings and hardwood forest with elevation that makes Sage Run look flat, and the view of the lake from the high tees will stop your group cold. It is regularly ranked among the best public courses in Michigan, and Michigan is not a state that hands that out lightly. Play it in October if you can. The color is absurd.
Timberstone sits at Pine Mountain in Iron Mountain, about an hour west, and it is the quiet overachiever of the group. Jerry Matthews cut it through the hardwoods with more than 200 feet of elevation change and greens that punish anyone who gets lazy with a wedge. It carries a five-star rating from Golf Digest and plays like a private club that forgot to lock the gate.
Off the Course
The hotel side of Island is the reason this trip works for a group. There are 454 rooms and suites, a spa for the couples crowd, several restaurants, a showroom that books real touring acts, and a casino floor that stays busy until the last guy in your group has given back his skins money. The drive between courses runs through some of the prettiest country in the Midwest, and the pasty shops along the highway are not optional. Get one. Get two.
If you are coming from Chicago, Milwaukee, or Minneapolis, it is a drive, but it is a drive with a purpose. Escanaba, Iron Mountain, and Marquette all have airports if you would rather fly in and rent something with a trunk big enough for five sets of clubs.
What's A Pasty?
A pasty (rhymes with "nasty," not "hasty") is a baked hand pie: a half-moon of pastry crimped along one edge, filled with diced beef, potato, onion, and usually rutabaga, then baked until the crust is golden. It is eaten by hand, no fork needed.
It came to the Upper Peninsula with Cornish miners in the 1800s. The crust was a sturdy lunch box they could carry into the copper and iron mines, and the thick crimped edge doubled as a handle they could hold with dirty hands and toss away. Finnish and Italian miners adopted it too, and it became the unofficial food of the UP. Locals argue about ketchup versus gravy on top the way people argue about barbecue sauce elsewhere.
Along US-2 and US-41 you will see pasty shops every few miles, which is why this article tells you they are not optional. Lehto's in St. Ignace and Muldoons in Munising are the famous ones, but nearly every town has a local favorite.
Travel Notes: Mind the Time Warp
If you are driving up from Milwaukee or Green Bay, you start the trip in Central time and Island Resort runs on Eastern. That means a tee time at Sweetgrass, Sage Run, or Cedar is an hour earlier than your gut thinks it is. Account for the jump when you leave home. If time zone math is not your specialty, do not worry, you will not be the first foursome to show up to a tee time an hour late. You will just be the latest.
Timberstone complicates it further. Iron Mountain sits back in Central time, so if you leave the resort for Pine Mountain you cross the line again on the way there and once more on the way back. The smart play for anyone coming up from Wisconsin is to hit Timberstone on the drive in. You are already in Central time, you play, you eat at Famers, and you roll into Harris that evening with the clock change behind you and nothing but Eastern time tee times ahead.
One more warning. Your phone will not save you. Island Resort sits right on the time zone line, so phones flip back and forth depending on which tower they grab, and sometimes they do not flip at all. You are also in God's country, which means cell service is weak in spots and your clock may not update when you expect it to. Confirm the time zone when you book, write the tee time down in both, and set an old fashioned alarm.
Advanced Tip: Bring/wear an analog watch. It does not care what tower it is talking to, and it will not quietly change on you in the parking lot. Set it to one time zone when you leave home, remember which one, and let the watch settle every argument in the cart. The guy with the analog watch is never the guy who is late.
The Verdict
The perfect foursome was a great line and a better trip. Add Sage Run and it became one of the strongest golf packages in the Midwest. Add Cedar, and Island Resort and Casino now has a Golden Age course, a big-ridge modern course, a friendly resort course, and two of the best public tracks in Michigan within a 90-minute drive of the same casino bar.
Book the fall preview if you want to say you played Cedar before everyone else did. Book next summer if you want it all in one package. Either way, round out your foursome of guys and go tackle the five courses. The golf is worth the drive, and your stomach will thank you for it if you fill it with a pasty or two along the way.
